Many times we have talked about the importance of making backup copies of your documents and files that you do not want to lose, since after all a PC can fail or be infected with viruses, and there are things that you do not want to lose under any circumstances. concept. One of the best ways to backup your data is to use a USB hard drive , but many users “get lost” when it comes to knowing how and what to store on them. In this article, we are going to tell you everything you need to know.
A backup or security copy is, forgive the redundancy, a second copy of your files and documents in an alternative location, outside the PC. The idea is that if something happens to your main storage unit, you don’t have to worry about losing anything since you can recover it using precisely this backup. For this work, yes, we do not recommend using a USB pen drive, but a hard drive because it is more complicated for it to be lost and broken.
Prepare your USB drive for backup
The first thing you should do before anything else is to configure the USB device that you are going to use for the backup, and that involves connecting it to the PC, making sure that the system detects it without problems, and then formatting it properly. Also make sure that the USB drive has enough capacity to hold all of your data.
To do this, open a file explorer (WIN + E) and go to “This PC”. Your USB drive should be there, so right-click on it and select Format… A wizard will open, in which you need to select the NTFS format (since we are going to be based on Windows ).
At this point, you can select quick format so that it takes less time, since we are only interested in eliminating any content that the drive has and leaving it in NTFS format , which is the most optimized for what we are going to do.
Once you have done this, we are ready to make the backup.
This is how you make a backup of your data in Windows
Copying all your files and data to a USB storage drive can be quite a hassle, since we usually all have data scattered in different folders, not to mention program settings and such. Fortunately, Windows integrates a backup system that will do all this for us, so it is the tool that we are going to use today.
To access it, you can click on start and type “Backup” and access the tool directly, or you can go to the Control Panel and select “Backup and Restore”.
In the next menu, you will see that in the left area you have an option called “Create a system image”, so click on it and a new window will open. In this, you must select your USB hard drive in which you want to make the backup and click on next (if the drive does not have enough capacity or if it is not formatted in NTFS format, it will not let you continue).
On the next screen, a summary of what is going to be done will simply be displayed, and we will only have to click on “Start the backup” and wait for it to finish.
After clicking on the button, another window will appear with a progress bar, which will inform us of the status of the backup. The time it takes varies depending on the documents and data that we have stored in the system and the speed of the device that we have connected, but generally it should not take too long.
